But he finds, as we all do, that you can’t make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. Oh, sure, you can give a pleasing impression to others, flatter and appease them. Or, you can intimidate other people, threaten and menace them. But whether by cajoling or by coercing, you cannot elicit a gift of love.

The pilgrim, whether psychotherapy patient or earlier wayfarer, is at war with himself, in a struggle with his own nature. All of the truly important battles are waged within the self. It is as if we are all tempted to view ourselves as men on horseback.9 The horse represents a lusty animal-way of living, untrammeled by reason, unguided by purpose.

distill the myths that have enslaved and confined

There are no hidden meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained enlightenment, then a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper,

To some extent, each of us marries to make up for his own deficiencies. As a child, no one can stand alone against his family and the community, and in all but the most extreme instances, he is in no position to leave and to set up a life elsewhere. In order to survive as children, we have all had to exaggerate those aspects of ourselves that

But there is an apocryphal interpretation of the myth of Creation, which suggests that Eve’s formation from the rib of the lonely, sleeping Adam, was God’s second attempt at finding him a helpmate. When God first “created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him,”4 at the same time, “male and female he created them.”5 An old Hebrew

Too often the pilgrim lives as though his goal is to become the horseman who would break the horse’s spirit so that he can control him, so that he may ride safely and comfortably wherever he wishes to go. If he does not wish to struggle for discipline, it is because he believes that his only options will be either to live the lusty, undirected life

And in this turning, we each must go as far as we can in reclaiming any part of ourselves that we have till then disowned.

There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell.12 He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room’s only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just